Jason Headley

"Our band was called Down Temper. We played all around San Francisco. Every now and then, because we were glutton for punishment, we would load up a van, go down to LA, play a couple of shows to utterly indifferent crowds, then drive all the way home again."

"To pay the bills, I got a job in the mailroom of Cohn & Wells, an ad agency. That was my first grown-up job. About five months later a guy got fired, so I was promoted to the creative department as a copywriter. Primarily because I could do the job for half the price."

"I’ve always loved writing. It’s something I was able to just do by myself. And being from West Virginia, I learned to see the humor in just about anything. The ability to laugh your way through life is a strong part of the culture back home; even if it can get a little dark sometimes."

"When I was writing my first novel, I went to the American Legion with my dad. Some things I heard were just so funny I would immediately go to the bathroom and write it down word for word. I just knew I would use it somewhere in my new book, which was very much inspired by my hometown."

"Writing my novel, Small Town Odds, was a couple of years of me figuring out a lot of things by myself, making a lot of mistakes—many of which, are still in print in that book. I learned a ton about storytelling, which certainly helps me now with writing screenplays. I did the whole book tour thing, hung out with a bunch of writers. I realized they all talked about the books they had read, while I kept talking about the movies I’d seen. And I thought, 'Well, maybe that’s a sign.'"

“I still had a lot to learn about screenplays and their specificity, but the one thing I loved most about writing my novel was dialogue. I really loved it when the characters would get into conversation and reveal things about themselves. So when I finally got to write my first screenplay it was quite liberating to get to do so much of that."

"I adapted my novel into a screenplay first. I enjoyed the form so much that I went and wrote another. I discussed with Drea Cooper, the co-director of ‘California Is A Place’ doing a short film based on the second script. We actually went through the whole process of casting it, but never ended up making the film. Meanwhile, I’d started directing some commercials, so I decided to write another short script that maybe I could direct. And that became, ‘To Say Goodbye’."

"That's also how I came to meet Scott McCabe, who became a great creative and acting partner with me. I wrote this short bar concept to try a bit of acting myself and asked Scott if he would be in it with me. We got Steve Condiotti, a great DP here, and headed down to the Homestead bar to shoot this script. It got some interest online, and we had fun doing it, so we did a few more and that's how the ‘At the Bar’ series happened."

"Later I was thinking about TV show ideas and tried to build something that could use the bar shorts in some way. Eventually, through a convoluted path, I dropped that and leaned on my nearly lifelong love of David Letterman. I thought, 'What if a guy like me, at this age, did his own talk show on the internet?'"

"The idea for ‘A Kind of a Show’ was for a mismatched group of grown men to host a late night talk show from their garage—despite having no real skills, taste, or discernible talents. But the one thing they do have in abundance, is a belief that their voices should be heard by the world. We did a pilot presentation, shot it here at my house in one day—thirteen pages in twelve hours. Pretty ambitious, but it worked."

"I’ve written several feature length screenplays, but recently I’ve been focused on writing scripts that I can actually make. I still do commercial writing and directing to pay the bills, but I’m always working on a passion project on the side. It can make for some long hours, but it’s the only way I know to do it.”